Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Uncertainty
     … Sometimes we hear about other people who can get their minds to settle down really quickly, and you look at your mind and it’s not settling down quickly, so you wonder, “Am I doing something wrong? Can I do this?” Here it’s important to remember that other people’s minds are other people’s minds. One, you don’t really know if … 
  3. Warrior Knowledge
    Warrior Knowledge October 13, 2000 There’s a constant dialogue going on in the mind: “This is this.” “No, it’s that.” “This should be this.” “That should be that; you like this and you don’t like that.” All kinds of voices — and in many cases the voices are totally untrained. They’re just things we’ve picked up from here or there … 
  4. Concentration as a Skill
     … The techniques of focusing on the body, working with the breath—they in and of themselves could be boring aside from the fact that they are so important in helping to alleviate stress and suffering for the mind. When you see the danger of a mind that’s not trained compared with the benefits of having a mind that is trained, you’re more … 
  5. Ānāpānasati Day
     … All kinds of things can be influencing your mind right now. So where is your mind? What does it need? The remaining steps deal with getting the mind to counteract whatever is out of balance. You can gladden the mind as you breathe in, breathe out. You can steady and concentrate the mind as you breathe in, breathe out. You can release the mind … 
  6. Breaking the Arrows
     … But following the Buddha’s example, we know that if we develop good qualities of mind, we’re going to suffer a lot less. So here we are developing those qualities. We begin with mindfulness, which is the ability to keep something in mind—in this case, reminding ourselves that even though the body may age, there may be something in the mind that … 
  7. The Buddha’s Tools
     … So when we look at his ways of looking at the mind, his ways of looking at the world, it’s not that we’re trying to impose foreign ideas on our minds; we’re trying to familiarize ourselves with the tools he laid out for solving the big problems in our mind from a perspective that was outside of time. One of those … 
  8. Fabricating Around Pain
     … You’re trying to establish a good, solid foundation for observing events in the body, events in the mind, and particularly events in the mind. All too often we have a tendency to think that we’re simply on the receiving end of things coming in from outside. But the Buddha’s picture of the mind is a lot more active. Your mind plays … 
  9. At Home in Jhana
     … He was talking about peace of mind. You might think there are forms of happiness you get from very aroused states of mind, very active and running-around states of mind, but that’s not really happiness. The mind’s true happiness is when it’s at peace. Yet it’s so rarely at peace. It’s traveling around all the time, jumping from … 
  10. Tranquility & Insight in Tandem
     … That’s why we develop the path and particularly why we try to develop mindfulness and concentration. The two go together. Mindfulness is keeping something in mind. Concentration is getting the mind to stay with one thing. You can’t stay with one thing unless you can keep reminding yourself to stay there, because moments of attention in the mind are normally very fleeting … 
  11. Circumspection
     … We create these little worlds in the mind. But in order to create them, there has to be an element of blanking out, where one part of the mind lies to another part of the mind, closing things off for a second. It’s like when you go to a play, a traditional play, where between the scenes they lower the curtain. The curtain … 
  12. Where You Set Your Heart
    One of the ironies of modern Buddhism is how mindfulness is understood. It’s defined in the popular imagination as an openness to all things, allowing the mind to go where it wants, being non-judgmental, non-reactive, simply keeping track of what’s going on wherever the mind wants to go. This is very different from the Buddha’s teaching on mindfulness. He … 
  13. The Dhamma Eye
     … You look back and you say, “Everything up to this point has been subject to origination—i.e., it’s been shaped by the mind—but this is not shaped by the mind.” Things that are shaped by the mind will pass away, but this is not going to pass away, because it’s outside of time. If something were in time, it could … 
  14. A Gift of Strength
     … What does that mean? It means you have to look after the source of your actions, which is the mind, the intentions in the mind. In fact, the Buddha actually said at one point that your intention is the action. And it stands to reason that if intentions come out of a strong mind—well-balanced, wise, compassionate, mindful—then those intentions will be … 
  15. Mindfulness in the Driver’s Seat
     … One of them is that the chariot has a driver—a charioteer—and the charioteer is mindfulness. Mindfulness is what directs everything else. It’s a very dynamic picture. The mindfulness has to keep in mind where you’re supposed to be going and watch where you’re actually going. Seeing where you’re actually going, of course, is the function of alertness. The … 
  16. Practice Without Gaps
     … As the concentration gets more continuous, it really does have an impact on the mind. It strengthens the mind. Concentration is, basically, mindfulness practice that has become continuous. You remember. With mindfulness practice you set up one frame of reference—in this case, it would be the body in and of itself. The way you breathe right now is one example. Then you try … 
  17. Putting Out the Fires
     … We don’t like to think of our minds as defiled, but once the mind gets still and luminous, you begin to see greed, anger, and delusion are just that: clouds that come and obscure your mind. They make things murky inside so that you can’t see anything clearly. How does that process happen? How do we let those things take over? When … 
  18. Compassionate Duties
    One of the ironies of modern Buddhism is that the Buddha is represented as teaching us that we should have a non-reactive state of mind, a non-judging state of mind as our approach to life in general. Whereas when you look at his teachings, you can see that there are a lot of judgments from the very beginning. As he said, there … 
  19. Training Your Minds
    Training Your Minds April 10, 2011 Close your eyes and focus on the breath. Take a few deep, long in-and-out breaths and see how the process of breathing feels. Notice where you feel it. What kind of sensations do you have in the body when you breathe in? What kind do you have when you breathe out? Where do you feel the … 
  20. Let Pleasure & Pain Fall Off the Plow
    Let Pleasure & Pain Fall Off the Plow June 1, 2018 Ordinarily, the mind goes bouncing back and forth between pain and sensual pleasure. Even though we may realize that sensual pleasures have their drawbacks, we keep going back, going back anyhow because we don’t see any other alternative to pain. When the Buddha taught what he called the middle way, it was to … 
  21. Quiet in Every Way
     … The mind really does get quieter. And only when the mind gets quiet can you begin to notice things. Once when I was in Rayong a group of people from Bangkok came up the hill to where I was staying in the old ordination hall. They plopped themselves down in the hall and exclaimed how peaceful, how quiet it was there in the monastery … 
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